The Past Speaks

AS: I have just discovered that Howard Aldrich, has blogged a short review of Ged Martin’s Past Futures: the Impossible Necessity of History (University of Toronto Press, 2004).Howard E. Aldrich received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is Kenan Professor of Sociology and an Adjunct Professor of Business at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Some book titles are so compelling that you’d feel guilty if you didn’t at least pick the book up and skim it. Such is the case with Ged Martin’s book, Past Futures: the Impossible Necessity of History (University of Toronto Press, 2004), based on the 1996 Joanne Goodman lectures at the University of Western Ontario. Despite his thoroughly convincing arguments that historical explanation, as we know it, is methodologically and analytically impossible, he managed to convince me that it is nonetheless worth doing. This is the kind of book that people used to describe as a tour de force.

It is nice to see this book finally getting the attention outside of history departments that it deserves.